What is the Money Board's opinion on high frequency trading?

Did you just watch the latest Daily show on hulu by chance?

I don't care much.

One thing many commentators are missing is that HF traders are essentially beating the big Wall Street firms at their own game. They are not competing against you and me.

LINK

quote:

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1. HFT doesn’t prey on small mom-and-pop investors. In his first two TV appearances, Lewis stuck to a simple pitch: Speed traders have rigged the stock market, and the biggest losers are average, middle-class retail investors—exactly the kind of people who watch 60 Minutes and the Today show. It’s “the guy sitting at his ETrade (ETFC) account,” Lewis told Matt Lauer. The way Lewis sees it, speed traders prey on retail investors by “trading against people who don’t know the market.”

The idea that retail investors are losing out to sophisticated speed traders is an old claim in the debate over HFT, and it’s pretty much been discredited. Speed traders aren’t competing against the ETrade guy, they’re competing with each other to fill the ETrade guy’s order. While Lewis does an admirable job in the book of burrowing into the ridiculously complicated system of how orders get routed, he misses badly by making this assumption.

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Simplifying a little, US financial markets are basically split into two tiers - mom and pop, and big banks. The whole HFT discussion is about how the big boys play with each other and has nothing to do with you and me.

It's basically algorithmic trading done by computer systems to "front run" stock market orders. In theory this should be illegal but as of now its unregulated due to the complicated nature of the way these systems operate.

These firms can skim a few pennies or even fractions of pennies on countless millions of trades without risk because they can get in front of the bid/ask and buy and sell in fractions of seconds.

It's really only the tip of the iceberg in a market that is totally rigged and manipulated. With that being said I'll be up a 5:am with a hot cup of coffee pondering my next move in the stock/options market.

it's speculation as opposed to investing...
watch out for taxes..
how is it done without a high cost involved?